I. Field
The following description relates generally to wireless communications, and more particularly to efficiently providing scheduling information to a centralized scheduler in a wireless communication system.
II. Background
Wireless communication systems are widely deployed to provide various types of communication; for instance, voice and/or data may be provided via such wireless communication systems. A typical wireless communication system, or network, can provide multiple users access to one or more shared resources. For instance, a system may use a variety of multiple access techniques such as Frequency Division Multiplexing (FDM), Time Division Multiplexing (TDM), Code Division Multiplexing (CDM), Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM), and others.
Common wireless communication systems employ one or more base stations that provide a coverage area. A typical base station can transmit multiple data streams for broadcast, multicast and/or unicast services, wherein a data stream may be a stream of data that can be of independent reception interest to a user device. A user device within the coverage area of such base station can be employed to receive one, more than one, or all the data streams carried by the composite stream. Likewise, a user device can transmit data to the base station or another user device.
Base stations may schedule reverse link communications transferred from user devices to base stations. For instance, when employing Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM), the base station may effectuate scheduling decisions (e.g., allocate resources such as time, frequency, power, etc. to one or more user devices) pertaining to reverse link communications, and thus, the base station may facilitate maintaining orthogonality. However, conventional techniques for providing scheduling information from the user device(s) to the base station(s) may be inefficient, time-consuming and difficult. Moreover, scheduling information oftentimes may fail to be provided to a centralized scheduler (e.g., base station). By way of illustration, early voice cellular systems commonly utilize circuit switched scheduling, where each user may be assigned a dedicated circuit switched channel for a duration of a call; in this case, collection of scheduling information may occur at a very slow rate and information may be sent as high level data packets. Further, Data Only (DO) typically employs signaling layer protocol high layer data packets. Additionally, DO rev A oftentimes enables access terminals to make scheduling decisions in a distributed manner; however, such distributed scheduling may inhibit an ability to maintain orthogonality associated with reverse link communications.